Showing posts with label Emerald. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emerald. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

MFRW Monthly Quote - November 2014 #MFRWAuthor #Quotes

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in service to my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
-Audré Lord









Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured or are forthcoming in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, Logical-Lust, and Sweetmeats Press. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Her first solo books, If... Then: a collection of erotic romance stories and Safe: a collection of erotic stories, are out now from 1001 Nights Press. Find her online at her website, The Green Light District.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

MFRW Monthly Quote - October 2014 #MFRWauthor

"The secret of the creative life is often to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We are paid to take risks, to look silly. Some people like racing car drivers are paid to take risks in a more concrete way. We are paid to take risks in an emotional way."        
-Paul Schraeder








Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Her first solo books, If... Then: a collection of erotic romance stories and Safe: a collection of erotic stories, are out now from 1001 Nights Press. Find her online at her website, The Green Light District.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Author Conferences: A Recap of Hot Mojave Knights by @Emerald_theGLD #MFRWauthor #HMK2014


For this month’s post, I'm embarking on a timely deviation from my discussions about moderating the MFRW Facebook group to talk a little bit about a reader and author convention I attended last weekend. HMK (Hot Mojave Knights) is a romance reader event designed to bring authors and readers of romance together for a weekend of learning, interaction, fun, and ogling hot men (a.k.a. the knights). This year was its second iteration, and I attended the inaugural conference last year as well.

HMK is held in Las Vegas (which for me serves as a reason to go in and of itself!), and both the reader and author attendees tend to collectively represent virtually all genres of romance. For authors, the convention offers the chance to promote one's work and meet readers both familiar and unfamiliar with it.

But the real reason for HMK is the readers. The founders and organizers of HMK, Shannan Albright, R. M. Sotera, Johanna Riley, and Siobhan Muir (who did not organize or attend this year but was one of the founding organizers last year) developed the event to bring readers into direct and personal contact with the authors whose work they so enjoy. The convention is kept deliberately small, with attendance capped at 200 people if I remember correctly, to allow the kind of intimate interaction the founders envisioned to set HMK apart from the many other romance-oriented conferences that take place each year.

As an author, I consider my attendance at HMK an investment—as well as, I must admit, a blast. I have enjoyed it immensely both years I have attended, and I am already looking forward to attending next year. As an author, I get to promote my books and brand, have swag included in the swag bags handed out to all registered attendees, hear directly from readers (and meet many potential new ones), and display and sell books at the author signing.

The weekend includes craft-related panels for authors on topics such as how to write historical novels, understanding Kindle Direct Publishing, and tips for writing or researching kink-related topics. Evenings are filled with organized social events to give readers and authors alike the chance to enjoy each other’s company in an informal setting. The event is small enough that you’re almost sure to get the chance to meet or interact with any attendee you’d like to.

The author signing is one of the signature events of HMK and offers the opportunity for all the featured and spotlight authors to set up books and swag and aim to dazzle all the visitors that come through. :) Authors keep all the proceeds from any books they sell. This year, the signing took place on the Saturday afternoon of the weekend and was open and free to the public.

HMK 2015 is already scheduled for October 1-4. While the organizers are (I hope!) taking a well-deserved break before they delve head-first into the planning and organizing of next year’s event, there will be opportunities to sign up to be a featured author at it over the next few weeks (registration for featured authors will be open until February 28). If you would like to be kept up to date on that, I encourage you to follow HMK on Facebook and Twitter, and you may also check the HMK website in the coming months for more information. (And if you’re interested in checking out the action that occurred last weekend in Vegas, look up the hashtag #HMK2014 to get a taste.) I have already signed up to be a spotlight author and am looking forward to attending again.

As an author, do you like to attend events or conferences? If so, which ones? Does the idea of a smaller event like this interest you?

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!


Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Her first solo book, If... Then: a collection of erotic romance stories, is out now from 1001 Nights Press. Find her online at her website, The Green Light District.


Thursday, September 18, 2014

MFRW Monthly Quote - September 2014 #MFRWauthor

“Don’t be afraid of yourself when you write. Don’t check-rein yourself. If you are afraid of being sentimental, say, for heaven’s sake be as sentimental as you can or feel like being! Then you will probably pass through to the other side and slough off sentimentality because you understand it at last and really don’t care about it.”
-Brenda Ueland






Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Her first solo book, If... Then: a collection of erotic romance stories, is out now from 1001 Nights Press. Find her online at her website, The Green Light District.

Friday, September 5, 2014

MFRW Facebook Group: Facilitating Guest Blogging @Emerald_theGLD #MFRWauthor

Greetings all! Before I get started, I’d like to again give a shout out of thanks to Kayelle Allen, MFRW’s founder, for covering for me here on the fifth of last month while I was on vacation. Because that’s what kind of an awesome leader Kayelle is. :)

Thus far in this series, I’ve talked about my responsibilities as the moderator of the MFRW Facebook group. Starting with this post, I’ll be branching out and covering aspects of Facebook more generally, given that I feel as though I’ve covered now much of what’s involved in moderating a group (though if you do have questions about moderation, by all means please feel free to mention them in a comment, and I’ll be happy to address them!).

This month’s topic comes to us courtesy of Paloma Beck, MFRW’s Blog Director, who mentioned to me that some members might be wondering about this particular Facebook function.

The MFRW Facebook group houses a document that allows members who host guest authors on their blogs to enter their blog information into said document for other members’ reference. In other words, the file is a centrally-kept source of places that offer cover reveals, spotlight features, etc., that is updated in real time whenever anyone edits it and is available for any group member to see or edit.

So, if you have a blog and are open to posting guest posts and would like other members to know that, feel free to enter your information into the sheet! Here’s how:

1) From the MFRW Facebook group page, go to the horizontal menu bar just below the header photo across the top of the page. Click the last entry, which is “Files.”

2) Locate the file titled “GUEST OPPORTUNITIES on Member Blogs” and click on it.

3) After you click, find the “Edit” button (with the little pencil icon next to the word on the button itself) in the upper-right corner of the document. Click that.

4) Enter your information in the format previous listers have used. An easy way to do this is to highlight the most recent entry, copy it, and paste it a line or two above that entry. Then delete that member’s information (leaving the category labels) and fill in your own.

If you have a new release and are seeking blogs where you could guest post or do a cover reveal, etc., this document is a great resource. To find it, simply follow steps one and two above! 

Before I go (I saved the announcement for last this time :)), I do want to say that the MFRW Facebook group reached—and quickly surpassed—the 4,000 member landmark since my last Facebook-related post here! Thanks to all the members for making it such a growing, active group.

Until next time!


Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Monday, August 18, 2014

#MFRWauthor Monthly Quote - August 2014

"Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway."
-Robert Henri





Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Preparing Artwork for Newsletters (Or Blogs)


How do you put together an award-winning newsletter?  Well, you could use Word and just write a lot, but that would be kind of boring.  What sets one newsletter apart from another is the use of artwork.  There are a lot of different programs out there that enable you to edit artwork.  I like IrfanView.  It’s free, and I find it easier than the Microsoft or Adobe programs.  Microsoft wants to store everything in the Cloud and I don’t necessarily want to store other people’s book covers in my Picasa account.  As for Adobe, I seem to have a mind-block when it comes to that program.  Don’t know why.

So, when I receive a photo, I save it to a folder I keep for my newsletter artwork.  If the author doesn’t send artwork, I go to her/his publisher’s website or to Amazon and copy it from there.  If I get it from Amazon, I’ll need to crop the Amazon info from the artwork.  To do that, I open the file in IrfanView.  I then click on the magnifying glass icon with the + sign until the image is large enough to work with.  Place the cursor at your favorite corner of the book, and outline the book.  Then go to edit and scroll down to “Crop selection,” and click.  If you’ve done it right, you should have just the artwork without the Amazon logo.

I like to keep all of my artwork at a uniform size.  I think 1.5 inches wide works best.  Book covers are usually about 1.5” wide by about 2.25” long.  Author photos tend to be more square.  And I think 150 dots per inch works fairly well.  So, go to Image, which is the drop-down menu right next to Edit.  Click on Resize/Resample.  You’ll see the boxes where you can set the sizes for width and height.  Make sure you click on inches or pixels—whichever you’re most comfortable with.  I usually make sure the “Preserve Aspect Ratio” and “Apply Sharpen After Resample” boxes are also checked.  Finally, I set the DPI (Dots per Inch) box at 150 or 300, depending on how dense you want your artwork to be, and how large you want your file to be.  The MFRW Newsletter is up to almost eight pages and will soon be over a hundred, so 150 DPI are plenty for us.


Save your artwork in its folder, and you’re good to go!

Now I’d like to introduce you to Emerald.  When our staff splits and we have an editorial section and an Advertising Section, Em will head the editorial side.
 

Emerald is an erotic fiction author and general advocate for human sexuality as informed by her deep appreciation of the beauty, value, and intrinsic nature of sexuality and its holistic relation to life. Her work has been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust, and she serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW). Read more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Friday, July 18, 2014

MFRW Monthly Quote - July 2014 #MFRWauthor

"An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family as a withdrawal from them. It is…. An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the time of healing alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted."
-Juila Cameron



Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Moderating the #MFRWorg Facebook Group—Keeping Track of Group Posts #MFRWauthor

As of this writing, the MFRW Facebook group is at 3,918 members. While I thought I might perhaps be announcing the 4,000 milestone marker with this post, it appears that will have to wait until next month. :) I won't be surprised if we hit it by sometime around the middle of next week. The group’s growth is still going strong!

For this post, I thought I’d mention a feature I discovered relatively recently that some group members and especially moderators may find useful. If you aim to keep up with the posts to a group, Facebook has a feature that makes it a bit easier. Each new time you visit the group page, Facebook indicates the point at which the posts on the page are ones you’ve already seen. It does this with a label that says “OLDER POSTS” in the left margin. The label is a bit subtle, written in shaded gray and in a somewhat small font size. Once you know to look for it, however, it can help you keep track of which posts you’ve seen and which you haven’t.

For me, for example, it’s a very helpful feature in moderating the content posted to the group. Before I learned of this feature, I used to haphazardly visit the group multiple times throughout the day and vaguely memorize when I had last been there so I could tell when I had scrolled down far enough that the posts were ones I’d already seen. Now, I click on the group listing from my home page feed and scroll down until I see the “OLDER POSTS” heading (often I’ll just do a Control/Command + F search with the word “older” to locate it quickly). Then I simply check the new posts by scrolling up the page until I get to the top.

For moderators, this makes keeping track of checking the group page content much easier. And if you’re a group member, this feature lends a hand if you want to be sure you don’t miss any posts. :) Do note that whenever someone comments on a post, that post automatically moves to the top of the group page, so if you see posts you’ve already seen amidst the new ones before you get to the “OLDER POSTS” label, that just means a new comment(s) has been left on it.

To learn what the “OLDER POSTS” heading looks like, you can go to any group of which you are a member (the MFRW one, for example :) ). At the top of the page beneath a pinned post if there is one, you should see a shaded gray heading that says, “RECENT POSTS.” This means that the posts that follow that are ones that are new since your last visit to the group, and the font and appearance of the “RECENT POSTS” heading are exactly like the “OLDER POSTS” one. If you scroll down far enough, you’ll eventually see the “OLDER POSTS” heading, indicating that all the posts below that are ones that were already posted the last time you visited the group.

Incidentally, if you haven’t been by in a while, you may want to go check out the MFRW Facebook group—holiday weekend sales and giveaways abound! For those who are celebrating U.S. Independence Day, I wish you a safe and beautiful holiday weekend. And for those who aren’t, I wish you a beautiful weekend as well, and you may want to come by and take advantage of the sales and giveaways of those who are! ;)

Thanks for reading, and until next month!


Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

#MFRWorg Monthly Quote - June 2014

"From the age of six to fourteen I took violin lessons but had no luck with my teachers, for whom music did not transcend mechanical practicing. I really began to learn only after I had fallen in love with Mozart’s sonatas. The attempt to reproduce their singular grace compelled me to improve my technique. I believe, on the whole, that love is a better teacher than sense of duty."
-Albert Einstein



Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Moderating the MFRW Facebook Group: Technical Functionalities #MFRWorg #MFRWauthor

I’m going to get a little technical today and discuss a few of the functions and features of groups on Facebook and how both members and moderators may use them or how they may affect how groups operate. I’ve mentioned in this series how much the MFRW Facebook group has grown over the last year (to sum up: when I started moderating last May, we had several hundred members. We reached 1,000 sometime that summer, and our current count is at 3,658). To be clear, I myself don’t personally do anything that influences this growth. I, as I have described in my other posts, receive and moderate the join requests, but I have no control over how many people ask to join.

A big contributor to that, I suspect, is the addition last year of Facebook’s “Suggested Groups” feature. If you’re on Facebook, you may have noticed the appearance of this list along the right side your profile. I noticed a significant upsurge in join requests when this happened, and I have no doubt this feature has resulted in far more members' learning of MFRW and joining the group than would have otherwise. I have a feeling it also, however, means people request to join without even looking at the group or having much of an idea what it’s for (which, in MFRW’s case, affirms the importance of member screening). If you’re a moderator, you may just want to be aware that people may be clicking on a suggested group without ever having visited the group’s actual page.

As far as I’ve determined, there isn’t a way to control or influence how much or where one’s group shows up in the “Suggested Groups” list. There is, however, a functionality called “Tags” that moderators can utilize. If you moderate a group, there is a link on the right side of the group page just below the “About” section that says, “Set Tags.”

Tags do not get to be whatever you want them to be. Rather, only words/phrases that Facebook provides via auto-fill may be selected. For example, I wanted to tag the MFRW group “Author Resources,” but Facebook didn’t have a category option for that, so it simply erased the tag when I saved it. I thus settled on the less specific categories of “Writing,” “Marketing,” and “Books.” This will at least give someone who glances at them an idea about the group’s focus. As far as how tags might affect a group’s popularity, we’re new enough to using this feature that I haven’t had a chance to observe any potential outcomes yet. I’ll report back if I see anything notable. ;)

Search functions are another area both members and moderators may find helpful at times. If you’re a group member, you can pull up a list of your activity (including posts and comments—“Likes” are not included in the search results) on a particular group by clicking on the magnifying glass icon all the way to the bottom right of the group page’s header (it’s just to the right of the “Notifications”/“Create Group”/settings buttons and icons) and entering your profile name. All the things you’ve posted, as well as posts on which you’ve commented or in which you’ve been tagged, will be brought up for display. This feature may seem useful if, like myself, you’ve been known to forget from time to time whether you’ve already posted something on the group page (lol). You can also do similar searches for other members’ activity.

If you want to simply see whether someone is a member of a group (who may or may not have performed activity in the group, making the above search method not helpful), you can do that by going to the “Members” tab along the horizontal menu bar beneath a group’s header photo. With this function, you can sort the members by name (alphabetically by first name/word of profile name) or by join date. As a moderator, I like the sort-by-join-date feature because it allows me to keep track of how many members have joined within a certain time period (though this is not exact in that the labels don’t have actual dates but rather indicate that someone was added “a month ago,” 8 months ago,” “2 weeks ago,” etc. When I want to keep track month by month, I make a note of the last name I approved on the last day of a month and then use that as the cutoff when I check the list the next month). For example, since my last post here about moderating this group, about 325 members have joined.

If you’re a group moderator, this search function also gives you the option of viewing your list of blocked members. Mine isn’t very long, but I have blocked a few profiles I determined to be spam, etc. On this list, there is a link associated with each profile that says “Remove Ban” if you change your mind about blocking someone or allowing someone to join.

And thus ends this tour of Facebook group technical characteristics. ;) Thanks for reading, and see you next month!


Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

#MFRWorg Monthly Quote - May 2014

     “Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?                                     
     Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.”
-Brenda Ueland



Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Moderating the MFRW Facebook Group: Getting the Most out of Group Membership #MFRWorg #MFRWauthor

So far in this series, I’ve talked a lot about things I do from the moderator side of the MFRW Facebook group. I’m shifting gears a little bit today to offer some recommendations for potential and current group members to get the most out of being a member of the group and using Facebook to help market your work.

Privacy Settings

First, I want to mention a couple things about privacy settings of which some people may not be aware. I want to clarify, however, that I completely understand setting one’s profile to private and am in no way discouraging that or recommending that people change their privacy settings if they’re set the way they want them. It’s completely fine if I go to a profile and don’t see any information about one’s involvement in the literary community due to that person's privacy settings—that’s why I send a message.

This, rather, is for those who mean to have certain things visible to the public and may unknowingly not. For example, a few times over the last month, I’ve received responses from potential members informing me that they do in fact list something like “Author,” etc., in the employment sections of their Facebook profiles. In my response thanking them for replying and indicating that I’ll approve their membership, etc., I’ve just mentioned that for whatever reason, that information wasn’t visible to me.

One author followed up with me to ask if I had any idea why I might not be able to see it, as she intended for the indication that she was an author to be publicly viewable, and her general profile was set to public viewing. I looked into it a little bit and discovered that each “Work and Education” entry in one’s “About” section can be set to its own privacy setting. In the instance in question, the author’s entry indicating she was an author had been set to be viewed by friends only.

To check on this or change these settings, go to your profile, hover over the upper right corner of the “About” section (on the left side of the page), click on the little pencil icon labeled “Manage” when it pops up, and choose “Update Info.” On the screen that then appears, there is a little icon with a downward-pointing arrow to the right of each entry under the “Work and Education” setting. You may click on that icon to choose the privacy setting (public, friends only, etc.) for that particular entry.

 

Posting to the Group

I read every entry that gets posted to the MFRW Facebook group (though if I did more than just skim over them, I’d spend little time doing anything else!). I do this to make sure they’re legitimate posts and ensure I haven’t inadvertently let any spam accounts join. I have thus seen how privacy settings can also affect how things show up when you post in a group.

For example, if you choose to share a book cover from one of your own photo albums on the MFRW group page, your privacy settings for that photo (or your photos general) will affect how it will show up on the group page. Occasionally I see a post on the group that says “Attachment Unavailable.” This can be for a few reasons, but one of them is if your photo privacy settings are set to allow only friends or friends of friends to view them. That will still be the case, then, if you post the photo to a group page, and the attachment will be indicated to be unavailable for everyone else. (It is easy for you yourself not to realize this, incidentally, since it will still show up for you on the group page, so nothing will seem to be amiss.)

One option for posting photos (such as book covers) to the group page, thus, is to simply post a link to the page where a photo appears, such as at the buy link, and let the link preview show the photo. If you do want to share a photo from one of your own Facebook albums or your timeline on the group page, just make sure the photo’s privacy settings are set to public viewing first. You can do this one of two ways:
  1. If you want to set the entire photo album containing the photo to be viewable by the public (say, for example, you have an album for book covers that you’d like anyone to be able to see), do the following: Click on “Photos” from your profile page. Once there, click “Albums,” locate the album you want to make public, and click on the little icon in the lower right corner of the album in question. Adjust the settings accordingly.
  2. You can also adjust the privacy settings of an individual photo. To do this, click on the photo in question. Right below your name and to the right of the date the photo was posted, you should see the small privacy settings icon with the downward-pointing arrow. Click on it and choose the desired privacy setting.

Links

It also tends to be a good idea to add a link to posts you’re posting on the group page if you're asking people to buy or visit something. Every once in a while I see posts asking people to check something out that don’t contain a link at which to do so. While sometimes a reference to where to find the post or book in question is provided, I think it’s fair to say that viewers are much more likely to follow through if all they have to do is click a link. :)

That being said, I do not recommend posting only a link with no corresponding picture, text, introduction, etc. When I see this, I’ll click on it, but not knowing whether it’s spam or what its origin or purpose is, I won’t really want to—I’ll only do so because of my responsibility as a moderator. Given my feeling that way, I suspect the link won’t get many clicks from others who don’t have that responsibility! This hasn’t happened very often, but I have seen it, and I recommend you just make sure the image or link preview you want to have show up with your post is indeed visible before you post it.

I hope this has seemed helpful to some readers. The MFRW Facebook group is a busy place, and we want all members to receive the maximum possible benefit of being a part of it! Thanks for reading. :)


Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Friday, April 18, 2014

#MFRWorg Monthly Quote - April 2014


“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful, but it is more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. We are tasked to make our lives, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of our most elevated and critical hour.”
-Henry David Thoreau



Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Moderating the MFRW Facebook Group—Pinning Posts (and a Membership Landmark!) #MFRWorg

First, a short announcement: since my last post here about moderating the MFRW Facebook group, the group reached (and passed) 3,000 members! The Facebook group has seen considerable growth since I started moderating it not quite a year ago. At that time, there were several hundred members. We reached 1,000 last June, if I remember correctly, 2,000 sometime late last fall, and now here we are at (as of this writing) 3,147 members!

In messaging with potential members during the request moderation process, I’ve often found myself suggesting that they consider joining the Yahoo Group as well. Since many potential members have mentioned where they are in their careers and what kind of marketing help they’re seeking or why, the conversation has often segued naturally into this invitation. MFRW’s Yahoo and Facebook groups serve notably different purposes at this point—since promotion is allowed on the Facebook group, it is used mostly for that right now, whereas the Yahoo Group (where no promotion is allowed) is where most of the group’s discussions about promotion, marketing, resources, etc., take place. So I personally see it as well worthwhile to be a part of both.

Which brings me (slightly indirectly) to the main topic of this post: pinning posts. A pinned post is a post on a group page that remains anchored to the top of the page irrespective of other posts. It is thus very useful as a reference point or to impart evergreen information that you’d like everyone who visits the group page to see, since it always appears as the first post on the group page.

In this case, since I found myself writing similar things over and over in private messages about the Yahoo Group and including the link to join, it eventually occurred to me that it would be much easier if I could just put this announcement somewhere and send people to it. Even better if it were somewhere group members and the public could see it.

Enter the pinned post. I wrote a short summary of MFRW’s Yahoo Group and other resources (such as its website), included links to all of them, added a note summarizing the process I use to moderate join requests, and pinned the post to the top of the group page. Now when I am in touch with potential members, I simply say something like, "Please see my pinned post at the top of the group page for information about MFRW’s Yahoo Group.” I have found this much more efficient. ;)

Only the moderator(s) of a group can pin a post, though any post on a group page may be pinned (i.e., the moderator doesn’t have to be the author of it). To pin a post, locate the post in question, hover over the upper-right corner of it until the little drop-down arrow appears, click on the arrow, and choose “Pin Post.” If at any point you want to unpin the post, follow the same directions and click “Unpin Post.”

Facebook currently only allows one pinned post at a time on group pages. Sometimes my post has been unpinned on the MFRW group in favor of special-event pins, such as when Summer Camp took place last year or when MFRW was up for several awards in the 2013 Preditors & Editors poll (the MFRW newsletter won for “Best Writers’ Resource”!). In these cases, Kayelle composed alternate posts that she pinned with these announcements, and the introductory post was unpinned and thus automatically returned to its original place in the group’s timeline. When it was time to put it back, I simply located it again and repinned it. Pinning and repinning may be done to any post that exists anywhere on a group's timeline. The “Likes” and comments remain intact, as pinning and unpinning don't actually alter a post in any way but rather just move it to a different place on the page.

Please note that the pinned post functionality is also available on “Pages,” so in the same way I described above to pin a post on the group page, you may pin a given post on your author page. This post will remain the first post listed on your page until you unpin it or replace it with another pinned post (the “one pin at a time” rule also applies to pages). To see an example of a pinned post and how it appears on the page, just visit the MFRW Facebook group and see mine (under my legal name, Emily McCay) at the top of the group page. :)

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!


Emerald
Emerald is an erotic fiction author whose short stories have been featured in anthologies published by Cleis Press, Mischief, and Logical-Lust. She serves as an assistant newsletter editor and Facebook group moderator for Marketing for Romance Writers (MFRW), and she selects and posts the monthly inspirational quote on the MFRW Marketing Blog. Find out more about her at her website, The Green Light District.